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Sam Nujoma, who fought towards apartheid and for Namibian independence and was recognized formally because the nation’s “founding father”, has died in Windhoek aged 95.
His demise brings to an finish the lifetime of one of many final remaining liberation heroes in southern Africa after the demise of others together with South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
Nujoma served as president of his nation for 15 years after independence in 1990, altering the structure in order that he may run for a 3rd time period.
Though he has been praised for serving to to make sure nationwide reconciliation together with his motto “One Namibia, One Nation”, he additionally helped set up a sample, prevalent in a lot of southern Africa, by which the liberation events have clung to energy for many years after independence.
Nujoma’s South West Africa Folks’s Organisation (Swapo) has dominated constantly since independence and received final yr’s election with 58 per cent of the vote. It has since dropped most of its Marxist ideology and has courted overseas funding, notably in power.
Namibia’s President Nangolo Mbumba stated Nujoma, who spent almost 30 years in exile earlier than Namibia received independence from South Africa in 1990, “impressed us to rise to our toes and to change into masters of this huge land of our ancestors”.
South Africa had taken over Namibia, which it known as South-West Africa, from Germany in the course of the first world battle.
Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, described Nujoma as an “extraordinary freedom fighter” who performed a number one function in not solely his nation’s struggle towards colonialism, but in addition within the marketing campaign that led to ending white-minority rule in South Africa.
“South Africa is united in grief with Namibians who’ve misplaced the chief of the Namibian revolution, who’s inseparable from our personal historical past of battle and liberation,” he stated.
Nujoma was born in 1929 in Ovamboland within the north of the nation, the primary of 11 kids. His dad and mom have been farmers and Nujoma spent his early years tending sheep and goats earlier than heading to the coastal metropolis of Walvis Bay, the place he labored at a whaling station.
Later, within the capital Windhoek the place he labored as a cleaner on the railway, he started to organise by way of commerce unions towards apartheid labour legal guidelines. In 1959, in Cape City, he co-founded the Ovamboland Folks’s Group, a forerunner of Swapo.
He was arrested in 1959 and fled into exile. For the following three many years, he travelled the world, campaigning for an finish to racist legal guidelines and for independence from South Africa. He procured weapons for Swapo’s armed wing which fought its first battle towards South African troops in 1966.
Within the Seventies, Swapo received recognition from the UN because the reputable consultant of Namibia’s folks, however its battle for independence grew to become entangled within the chilly battle.
South Africa insisted it wanted to maintain Namibia as a buffer towards Angola, whose MPLA liberation motion was financed by the Soviets and supported by 50,000 Cuban troops. Ultimately, Namibia’s independence was negotiated by the US in return for the withdrawal of Cuban troops.
Nujoma returned from exile in 1989. In his 2001 memoir, The place Others Wavered, he wrote that “he knelt and kissed the soil” of his beloved nation. He received the election with 57.3 per cent of the vote, a tally that elevated to 76.3 and 76.9 respectively in two additional victories as Swapo tightened its grip.
In workplace he was praised for selling ladies’s and kids’s rights, however he was virulently anti-homosexual, describing homosexuality as a “overseas and corrupt ideology”.
Namibia, with 2.6mn folks, stays one of the unequal nations on the earth.
The nation’s presidency stated it could declare a interval of nationwide mourning. “The foundations of the Republic of Namibia have been shaken,” it stated.
